That 30000 deaths per year figure for guns are mostly due to suicides. If you check the FBI numbers which only count homicides that 30000 figure becomes a lot less impressive and comes to less than 10000 ... 

With Opiods, once a user is addicted they will go on to progressively consume the drug until overdose so it's pretty clear from which is more of a health concern and especially when we consider that illicit drug abuse related deaths are growing at an alarming rate ... 

"Successful drug policy" is more costlier than going with the "drug abuse prevention policy". Illicit drug users wouldn't need treatment if they just avoided using illicit drugs and followed the god damn law instead of congesting the healthcare system further ... 

Huh, I didn't even know this was an issue. The more you know I guess.

Hopefully, some kind of bill passed on or more measures can be put into place to cut down opioid/drug abuse.

Am I the only one not seeing the problem here? Yes it is tragic, but like any kind of drug use it kind of falls on individual choice at the end of the day. No one is shoving these pills into someone else's mouth. 

I wonder what impact pot legalization would have on this crisis. Maybe people would flock to that as a safer alternative for pain relief or to get high or whatever reason people decide to abuse drugs for.

The only crime here is a tremendous wate of money on drug treatment programs, law enforcement and etc. 

Let me frame it this way, which would you rather have? Let's say I could give you $500 or so back in taxes every year (that is a Switch and a few games every year), or you could have that money taken from you and given away so some addict you don't know can get drug treatment. I would take the $500 myself ...

I'd be willing to bet - and this is just a theory, don't quote me on this - most of those opioid deaths weren't homicides. The fact that a lot of gun deaths are suicides doesn't make them any less of a public health issue. In fact, you could argue that suicide is more of a public health issue than homicide.

As for successful drug policy, what exactly is it? Sounds like you are just kind of hoping that people will suddenly start following the law. Like, yeah, "If only people didn't break the law" is a nice thought, but as those spiking overdose numbers would indicate, hope and prison aren't really getting us very far. 

End the Pot witch hunt and turn all those resources against heroine. When I was a kid heroine was a rockstar's drug. I've seen (not tried) most drugs but never seen Heroine or Peyote. I was always smart enough to stay away from the hard shit despite being offered many times.

I've had hydrocodone prescribed before and it did jack shit for my pain. Since then anytime a doctor has offered to prescribe it to me I've declined and gone for something ibuprofen based.  Never had a doctor say no yet.  So "pushed" ... absolutely, "no choice" ... wrong

It's important to always question doctors about what they prescribe to you. I got that advice from my uncle to where my cousin agreed: who is a pediatric doctor and his son is a gastrologist. One life example I can give is my mother had hip surgery and they pushed hard one blood thinner. My mother opted against the new blood thinner and for the tried and true that has existed for a long time. Following the surgery maybe a year later that particular blood thinner was on commercials for lawyers seeking victims. You should do your own research on anything a doctor prescribes or suggests because medical professionals are not perfect. They make mistakes, but that also doesn't mean that every doctor is pushing the wrong product and doesn't know your situation. Just don't be lazy when dealing with your health and do your own research. You don't want to face years of intense addictions over a little pain.

Yes but a person with drug addiction is a physical issue instead of a mental issue like we usually see with suicides. A heroin addict that gets treatment are over half as likely to relapse and sometimes that figure can be as high as 80% so most don't even try to seek treatment when they know it's futile for the most part but for gun suicides those people willingly take their own lives without much change in their brain's electrochemistry so there's not much we can do ... (a gun user won't be seeing the ICU too often while drug overdose users will get immediate treatment) 

To a gun user, the gun in his hand is nothing more than a tool that he could replace whereas a drug addict literally thrives on drug consumption until you know what happens ... 

Yeah, I would expect that people start following that particular law since it's rooted in medical science instead of being so wasteful towards the healthcare system ... 

Addiction is largely mental. Once you get past the physical symptoms (which is typically the period of time which treatment focuses on), it is the mental issues (often similar issues that lead one to suicide) which cause a relapse. Just as intervening and getting someone help is important to treatment of drug addiction, intervening and getting someone help is important for depression and those at risk of suicide. 

But theres not really any overall point I was making there. Just saying they are both public health issues.

What I do want to know is what you mean by that last bit. How are we to expect improvement if we don't change? If our current systems clearly aren't working, is it reasonable to expect that the drug epidemic will vanish because of a law that's been on the books for years? Do you think that imprisonment is in any way more beneficial to these individuals than actual treatment?

EDIT: The more I read about the treatment methods we use in the USA, the more I'm not surprised how high the relapse rates are. To seriously tackle opioid addiction, we need to rework how we deal with it not just from a prison/rehab level but within how rehab is handled itself. 

https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-drug-rehab-is-outdated-expensive-and-deadly